There is a haunted air that swirls in and around Divya Singh’s paintings. It creeps through window panes, hovers over a candle flame, lingers over the rim of a solitary cup and brushes past curtains. Then there are those seemingly spectral figures and otherworldly creatures that float across her frames. What accounts for these visitations, these ghostly presences in her works? Could it possibly be the magnetic pull of Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology that she first engaged with as a teenager?
Singh uses hauntology in her own inimitable way to contemplate how the present is always haunted by the past, and its possible bearing on the future. Employing allegory, she comments on how the future we were originally heading towards was highjacked by the rise of fascist and authoritarian forces.
Given our media-saturated world, it is perhaps unsurprising then that Singh turns to the internet to scour for inspirational images. These often comprise screenshots of scenes from iconic films, most notably Viktor Erice’s 1973 Spanish drama film, The Spirit of the Beehive, which depicts life from the viewpoint of two young sisters. Photographs of her family and home as well as those of people she knows or loves also form part of the artist’s extensive library of the imagination. She marshals these images, as one would the sequences of a film, creating her own singular order of things and wilfully complicating notions of space, temporality and authorship.
Time, existence, mortality and loss are themes that Singh continues to engage with in this show. But this time she leaves us with a whimsical, haunting, dream-like world, rooted in Sehnsucht and Weltschmerz, in loss and longing. 

- Meera Menezes 

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